Storytelling in Language Teaching

A need to share stories is something that every culture in the world has had in common since the beginning of time. For this reason, the great ELT methodologist, Mario Rinvolucri, referred to storytelling as the oldest language teaching technique in existence. Stories are an excellent context for making natural spoken language memorable, for presenting and exploring language, and for building learner and teacher confidence. If a curriculum solely consisted of teachers and learners telling stories, and then reflecting on those stories, we could argue that everything would be in place in order for language learning to happen.

In its basic format storytelling is very resource-light, requiring little more than the human voice. It can be done in very large classes with huge numbers of learners and very little equipment. At the same time, there are many online tools which can bring something new to the technique. This course will focus on all forms of storytelling, for teachers of all age groups. It will aim to develop the skills of the teacher as storyteller, provide practical classroom-based strategies, and look at ways to develop learner language proficiency through storytelling.